Essays & News

  Elections are supposed to change things. And in one sense, they do: when a populist government loses power, the rhetoric changes almost overnight. The speeches shift in tone, the enemy-of-the-people framing disappears, and international observers breathe a collective sigh of relief. But rhetoric is not policy. And policy, it turns out, is far stickier […]

  The conflict in the Middle East and the disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz have sent shockwaves through global gas markets. Before the war, around a fifth of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade transited through the strait, largely from Qatar, the world’s second-largest LNG exporter after the United States. The first […]

  The NATO summit in Ankara, Turkiye, on July 7-8, 2026, did not deliver many surprises, but it produced some satisfactory results for the future of the alliance. The North Atlantic Alliance, established during the Cold War, was designed to contain Soviet aggression. After the Soviet Union collapsed, many believed the alliance had outlived its […]

  Inflation does not befall us like a curse, nor does it descend on us as tragic fate. It is always the result of reckless, and sometimes criminal, policy. These words were spoken by Ludwig Erhard, the visionary German minister of economics who laid the foundations for West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”) in the 1950s and 1960s. Today, […]

  Ninety years ago, in 1936, Gottfried von Haberler left Austria permanently at the age of 36 to join the Economics Department at Harvard University. Holding the Galen L.bStone chair in international trade, he spent the next 35 years at Harvard until he retired in 1971. Many of his groundbreaking works, expanded in the 1933 […]